With the increasing capabilities of personal computers the hype
of professional production for amateur prices passes from one media
to another. After print publishing and audio the moving picture now
is ready for this challenge. But as the discussion about desktop
print publishing (DTP) was a simple one of old vs. new technology
the situation in the movies today is more complex. The term of a
Digital Revolution is associated with such different topics like
Star Wars, Blair Witch Project, Dogma 95, DV, DVD, DivX or
respectively the internet in general.
There are different ways to structure the discussion according to
aspects like production/distribution, aesthetics/economics or - the
way I will do it - low and high budget. The reason for this is that
though the bluring between low and high budget production seems to
be a central topic in the discussion of digital cinema to address
this issue seems to be more important in the low budget field,
while digital technology in the high budget world first of all
means postrealistic FX. There are two Digital Revolutions because
there are two dreams: The amateurs dreaming of movie-making instead
of just watching and the professionals dreaming of new creative
horizons.

In the early 90's Francis Coppola published his now
notorious vision that one day a little girl from Ohio would pick up her
father's video camera and shoot a marvelous movie. As it seems
low budget productions are more accepted today than they ever were.
Blair Witch Project has
become the most profitable movie ever with a budget of $ 22.000 and
a total gross of $ 140 mio in US cinemas alone. Thomas
Vinterberg's The Celebration - shot with an amateur
camcorder - won the Jury's Special Award in Cannes in 1998. The
direct roots of this development can be traced back for about ten
years, when in the early 90s a new wave of ultra low budget movies
like El Mariachi or The Living End rose. The budgets of
these movies were basically reduced to the - as it seems - not to
be dispensed costs for filmmaterial but they enjoyed an
international distribution.

The second reason for the current hype came from the computer
industry. While Robert Rodriguez was shooting El Marriachi Apple
introduced in May 1991 it's QuickTime software which made it
possible to watch and edit timebased data on a personal computer
without dedicated hardware. Though the videos were hardly bigger
than stamps the software extension kept video and audio in sync and
guaranteed a playback according to the defined frame rate
independent from the CPUs speed. These clips were first utilized on
multimedia-CD-ROMs more as gadgets than real movies. At the same
time dedicated editing systems like AVID came to the film and TV industry
and established a new style of editing. But neither early QuickTime
nor the AVID improved the situation for the independent cinema.
QuickTime was a closed system with low quality and the AVID was not
only more convenient but also much more expensive than a
traditional editing suite. Only with the introduction of DV (Digital Video,
miniDV) as a consumer recording and compression format and
IEEE 1394 (aka FireWire,
i.LINK, ...) as an interface between video recording and
postproduction machines the idea to do a final cut on a personal
computer became reasonable.
DV provided an image quality that was good enough that even TV
professionals started to use the tiny cameras. The miniDV tape with
its width of 66 mm hardly resambles any more what was known as a
video tape. It utilizes a compression ratio of 1:5 and so called
chroma subsampling that means that
color information is recorded with a lower resolution than the
luminance signal of the image. So compared with the seemingly
lossless 1:1,7 compression of Digital Betacam (as the professional
standard) DV can only be regarded as "semi-professional".
But the size and price of the cameras often make the decision to
shoot on DV reasonable. Beside of the still astonishing picture
quality the idea of lossless digital postproduction made DV
popular. As the information is initially digitized in the camera it
can easily be copied to the computer where the film can be mastered
with (virtually) no generation loss. IEEE 1394 initially was
developed by Apple in order to succeed the SCSI interface that
connected their computers with peripherals like hard discs and
scanners. Today it is hard to estimate if Sony knew what they were
really doing when they decided to integrate this computer interface
into their new products. But Apple used the chance to start its
marketing campaign for what they called Desktop Video (DTV).

Seeing this logical development it is astonishing that none of
the acclaimed independent productions of the 90's was shot on
DV. DV supporters often refer to the superior image and sound
quality of the format what does not quite show the crux of the
matter. Compared to 16mm, which according to Jon Jost will be replaced soon by the
new format, the DV image does not look too good at all. On the
other side the improvements as against the old consumer standard
Hi8 are obvious but hardly revolutionary. More important seems to
be the increased tolerance of low quality. In a media culture there
is a huge demand for discernable aesthetic concepts and one
possibility is a simple recourse to old techniques with specific
quality degradations.
Most of the 90's indies used 16mm or even 35mm film - but not
due to quality reasons but as an expression of high demands. The
only film that was at least partly shot on video was Blair Witch
Project that contained old-fashioned Hi8 footage. Those movies that
were shot digitally - like Winterberg's The Celebration or von
Trier's The Idiots - were made by established
directors that could have afforded to shot on film. As a matter of
fact the Domga 95-movement which is often associated with DV was
never intended to be about DV. The 9th rule of the Vow of Chastity even
demands "35mm Academy" as the format of choice. All
professional productions transfered their footage to professional
systems like AVID, DigiBeta or HDTV for post-production. But the
bluring of phenomena like the tremendous success of Blair Witch
Project and the Dogma-movies beeing celebrated in Cannes created a
hype that found it's icons in pictures like Lars von Trier with
his Sony VX 1000 on the set of The Idiots.

To my knowledge until today there is no movie of independent and
digital original that enjoyed a successful distribution in the
cinemas. Probably that day will come. But until then it's worth
to have a look at the ideas behind this movement. It's most
obvious characteristic is the promise of egalitarian production
structures. Decreasing prices and increasing capabilities of
production tools enable everybody to produce "real"
movies.

One of the latest examples for this idea is the short film
405 by Jeremy Hunt and
Bruce Branit. The movie shows the emergency landing of a passenger
plane on an LA freeway and contains state of the art 3D effects. It
was entirely produced on amateur equipment without any budget and
released on the authors' website. Shortly after its initial
release in June 2000 the film was moved to a commercial internet
portal and within two month seen by about 1 mio people.

A movie portal like IFILM only provides webspace and
streaming know-how but rarely pays for content. Branit and Hunt who
are both working in the FX industry know that the internet only can
be a first step of their self-realisation. "Our ultimate goal would be
to develop, write, direct, and produce anything cool, like
commercials, feature films, or music videos," Branit is
quoted. Beside of the fact that independent directors can hardly
finance their productions through the internet, digital technology
even decreases the durability of movies. A film that is not
perceived immediately after its completion can be regarded as lost.
The constantly changing technical standards and the speed of
information cause a compulsion to simultaneousness that contradicts
any kind of avant garde.

The cineproletariat did not obtain its production tools by
fighting but as a gift from the entertainment industry but when it
comes to the gates of distribution still stands before locked
doors. What looks at first sight like an oligarchic conspiracy or
just a Pyrric Victory in a running fight finally turns out to be
the real power of the cinema and a reason for its role as the
leading media of the 20th century. Narrow distribution channels
cause cultural identity. The cinema can not only win when it enters
the pluralistic realm of the broadband.
Cinema distribution remains an eye of a needle and 35 mm is its
global standard. Though digital projectors are on their way to take
over they will only pay off for years in the high budget field to
show even more "copies" of blockbusters in multiplex
theatres. (The same applies for digital HD cameras like Sonys
HDW-F900.) The initial 35 mm
print of a video production is about $ 30.000 which is a lot
compared to the $ 1.000 many of the ultra low budget productions
cost right now. At this distribution gate Next Wave Films has took its
stand. Next Wave is a company that doesn't look at authors'
scripts anymore but only at rough cut movies. "Were are seeking films which we
believe have a theatrical audience," says Peter Broderick,
president of Next Wave Films. The chosen movies are provided with
additional funding for professional post-production and marketing.
As with digital technology shooting an independent movie first of
all requires time instead of money the production risc is passed
over from the producer to the author. For that reason it is natural
that producers like Broderick celebrate DV.

For decades the independent cineasts have been laying their
claim to the cinema contrary to the traditional production
structures. This humanist-marxist claim to production tools for
everybody seems to be fulfilled today. Precisely in this historic
moment the cinema reveals how deep it is rooted in an industrial
culture, whose fetish is the serial.
But the serial nature of the cinema does not lie in the production
of repeating plots - as the opponents of the film industry are
telling us - but in the mass reception of its products.
Hitchcock's metaphor of the audience as a musical instrument
(an organ) to be played shows that the cinema as an industrial
model does not produce movies but viewers.

The author/director should keep in mind that since the 50's
there have always been possibilities to make movies beyond the film
industry. But today it becomes more and more important to stand out
against the crowd and when traditional values like mobility and
creativity are occupied by the marketing of media and technology
companies the independents have to redefine themself.